The Stranger Game

by Peter Gadol

  My foray had been pointless. I’d determined nothing, and if I wanted to know what Ezra had found out, I’d have to reach out to him, which I wasn’t going to do. Sitting at a stoplight, I screamed in frustration. Now what—now what!

  I arrived home to find a handwritten note tucked into a small white envelope and taped to my front door. It had to have been left after I’d gone out, deliberately left while I wasn’t home, I decided, which meant I was being watched. I read it several times in my kitchen before leaving it on my counter and stepping back cautiously as if it were a stunned animal, which once reoriented would leap up and snap at me.

  Dear Rebecca,

  I know you must be wondering where I’ve been. I had to go into hiding. I am about to leave town for good, never to return. But before I go, I want to apologize to you and explain what has been going on. Maybe this is selfish of me, but I need that closure. Maybe you do, too.

  I fell in love with you, and this is not the way I wanted things to turn out. Please let me say how sorry I am in person.

  Will you meet me tomorrow at noon at the abandoned house up in the canyon? I know you probably don’t want to hike back up there, but I think it’s safe because it’s the last place anyone would expect us to go. I trust you to come alone.

  You have no idea how much I’ve missed you. I doubt I can make things right, but I want to try. Please let me try.

  Love,

  Carey

  I DIDN’T HAVE ANY OTHER NOTES OR GROCERY LISTS LYING AROUND to verify it was Carey’s handwriting, but I believed it was. I couldn’t remember him ever saying he loved me before. I wasn’t moved—was this a trap? I also could not deny that the prospect of an explanation appealed to me a great deal, his contrition. And then I replayed the pantomime exchange I’d witnessed on Detective Martinez’s stoop: What exactly was Ezra up to? These men who disappeared on me and returned when it suited them, rueful, penitent—why should I have faith in either of them?

  At some point, I lay down to rest my eyes for a few minutes—and awoke in darkness hours later, disoriented, the day a riddle. I thought I heard footsteps out on my terrace and bolted up. In the kitchen I turned on all of the outside lights. No one was there.

  I reread Carey’s note on the counter where I’d left it, curling now in the hot night. There was no way I could meet him on these terms.

  I tried and failed to go back to sleep, made a sandwich at three in the morning, and decided it was my turn to disappear without a trace. I packed a bag with a week’s worth of clothing and a backpack with all of the books on my night table. I showered and waited for sunrise, when I would vanish.

  Sitting in the corner chair in my bedroom, I didn’t nod off, but I wasn’t fully awake either. I thought about that first clean crosscourt forehand I hit with Carey’s spare racket when I found him practicing his serve. Handing him produce at the farmer’s market to place in our bag, zucchini, mushrooms, parsnip, thyme. We had fallen asleep the same way every night with Carey behind me, surrounding me, although as the weather became warmer, I would wiggle free after his breathing slowed and he was out, and then in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and he would have inched over to me and embraced me again, like he needed me in order to sleep. He could not have been acting the entire time. There had to have been a turn, and this was what I most wanted to know: When was the turn?

  I would like to blame the weather, the deadening heat that shadowless morning—and maybe the sun did in some way exacerbate my loneliness and impair my ability to reason—but I can’t claim I didn’t fathom the risks. Here in front of me was a trial, and arrogantly I believed I could get through it and be stronger, and then break back into being who I wanted to be in life. I don’t know that I will ever be able to explain why instead of tossing my bag and backpack in my trunk and driving out of the city, I calculated how long I would need to drive up to the park and hike up to the abandoned house in order to arrive precisely at noon.

  There were a few cars in the parking lot; none that I recognized. No one was out playing tennis, nor hiking for that matter; no one was ahead of me on the trail, the sun too white. I didn’t think to bring a water bottle or a hat. I heard footsteps again, behind me now, and I looked around (I kept looking around the entire way), but I was only hearing the crunch of dry grass beneath my own boots.

  I picked up the pace. Maybe I could get there first—yes, I should have worked it out to get there first. Say what you have to say, and then I never want to see you again. Say what you have to say, and then I want to have crazy, crazy sex right here in this empty house, and then I never want to see you again. Say what you have to say, and then I want you to drive with me out of the city, no conversation, no destination—everyone dreams of living an improvised life, let’s do it.

  A new padlock had been inserted into the warped fence, making it impossible to shimmy through. Police tape had been wound around the gate, as well. I climbed it and straddled it briefly before landing hard on the other side. I didn’t want to go back through the house, so I took the exterior stairs down to the terrace.

  And there he was.

  Unshaven, his hair a mess. Wasn’t he too warm wearing a hoodie and jeans? He was standing at the edge of the terrace with its unfinished wall. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the bottom step, half arriving, half exiting.

  “You came after all,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

  When I pictured Garcia falling right where Carey was now standing, I thought I might faint.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “I am,” I said. “Hello.”

  “Hi. Can you come closer?” he asked, but I didn’t move. “Please?”

  I took two steps forward: say what you have to say.

  “Oh, Rebecca. I’m so very sorry.”

  He pushed up his sleeves. His hoodie was half soaked through with sweat.

  “Can you come closer? I don’t want to shout.”

  I took another step toward him, only one.

  “I want you to know that I really did—do—love you, Rebecca. We were so happy.”

  Was that true? I started to ask my question: “When exactly—?”

  “I told you about how I owed a lot of money. That pressure was always there,” Carey said. “I’d been in touch with someone back when I was playing the game—”

  “The bald guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  “It’s better you don’t know. I’m telling you all of this so you don’t have to walk around trying to figure out what happened, but then you should forget about all of it—”

  “Is Carey your real name?” I asked.

  “You know it is! Why? Did someone tell you otherwise?”

  “Various detectives,” I said.

  “Oh, well, they would I guess,” Carey said.

  “They would? Why?”

  “Can you come a little closer? Please?”

  I did move in, but not all the way next to him.

  “You owed money,” I said. “You were trying to figure out a way to pay off your debt.”

  Carey nodded. “Sometimes when you were at your office,” he said, “I worked as a stager.”

  He stepped closer to me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Did you work for the bald guy—”

  “Yes.”

  “Were the police—”

  “You don’t need to know. It’s so much better if you don’t know.”

  This irked me. “I came here because you said you would explain everything.”

  “I did, I know. Let me try.”

  “Maybe I don’t need to know,” I said, because oddly at that moment I was satisfied.

  He’d been playing the game, followed me, hurt me, apologized, fallen for me, been with me, wanted to be with me, but his debts were too great, he
was in too deep. All of this I could believe, all of this made sense. I started to turn around to leave and Carey lurched forward and grabbed my arm. He immediately let go.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But please don’t go yet. Please.”

  We were standing next to each other now near the edge of the terrace, close enough for me to see how the sun evinced his freckles.

  “What really happened that morning when we hiked up here?” I asked. “What was really going on?”

  “As I said, I worked for...for the man you refer to as the bald guy,” Carey said.

  “Right, you said, but what about that morning? You wanted to go on a hike—”

  “Alone. You weren’t supposed to come. I got a call that there was someone disrupting stagings and my help was needed to distract him and stop him. I was given the time and place where they expected he’d be.”

  “He was set up,” I said. “Why did you agree to let me come with you?”

  Carey shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. I thought it would be fun for you to see another staging? Or maybe I thought I’d distract this guy, this staging disruptor—”

  “Carlos Garcia,” I said.

  “Yes. And then this would give me the opportunity to come clean about everything. I wouldn’t have to hide anything anymore.”

  This seemed believable to me, but: “Did you know that Garcia was A. Craig?”

  Carey nodded. “They didn’t want him to mess with the game anymore. It was no longer his. He needed to let it go.”

  They sounded ominous. Who was they? Or maybe I should ask: How vast was they?

  “It never really was his game,” I said. “Did you know that the bald guy was going to push him—”

  “No!” Carey said. “I definitely wasn’t told that would happen. And I don’t know if it happened in part because we were late—”

  “We were?”

  “We stopped to talk to the police about your neighbor’s burglary, and by the time we got up here...” His voice had grown quieter, as if he was worried about being overheard even with no one around us.

  “It was an accident?” I asked.

  “They told me we’d only rough him up.”

  I couldn’t follow this. “Who is they and who is we?”

  “Does that really matter? You have to believe me. Do you believe me?”

  I did and I didn’t.

  “Why was the bald guy wearing surgical gloves?” I asked, because maybe he hadn’t intended to kill Garcia, but he did plan on causing him grave harm and didn’t want to leave a trace.

  Carey stared at me, his eyes darting left to right, left to right. What did this detail mean to me? Where was I going with this inquiry?

  “I didn’t think they would push him. You have to believe me,” he said again.

  “But they did.”

  Then there was Allagash removing Carey’s things from my place, pushing his investigation, threatening me, but then when I saw him again, he was all lackadaisical about the prospects of closing a murder case. Maybe he wanted to erase any connection between the bald guy and Carey. Carey was either lying to me or didn’t understand with whom he was involved. Unless—

  “I wish we could go back in time, Rebecca. I wish I could wake up next to you again.”

  Unless the reason Carey was summoned to the abandoned house wasn’t to help stop Garcia from shooing away players or to scare Garcia off from reasserting his moral sway with another essay. Perhaps they wanted Carey at the house so he could witness what they were capable of doing to people like him who didn’t pay off debts, who didn’t fall into line and do their bidding. Carey knew too much. Maybe he’d stopped playing along; maybe he’d gone rogue. They lured Garcia to the house by setting up a staging for him to interfere with the way he had been lately (and he must have been having some success). They gave Carey a reason he didn’t fully understand to make sure he was up here at the same time so they could threaten him indirectly. But what did it mean that I witnessed everything, as well, when that wasn’t part of the original plan? Who now was I to them?

  Carey tucked a loose strand of my hair back behind my ear. I flinched.

  He had stepped forward without my realizing it, close enough to whisper, “I only want to hold you again. Can we hold each other?”

  His breath smelled like vinegar.

  He said, “I knew you’d see me at the sculpture garden. I knew you’d come by the tennis court that afternoon. Then it would all be wonderful after that.”

  His voice sounded exactly the way it did the first night at my house, unctuous, creepy. Your sweater. You didn’t see me, you never saw me? Maybe then I do win.

  Here he was, who he had been all along.

  “I thought you had to go into hiding,” I said. “That’s what you said in your note.”

  “I did. I do.”

  He leaned in to kiss me. I leaned back.

  “Then why were you out in the open meeting with the bald guy at a sidewalk café?” I asked.

  Carey straightened his back. He started to say something and didn’t.

  “You were in public—”

  “So nothing would happen,” Carey said. “Nothing would happen at a café with everybody watching.”

  He was afraid. He had been successfully intimidated.

  “What were you arguing about?” I asked.

  Carey grabbed my forearm again, this time not letting go. It was not affectionate. He gripped it tighter and tugged me toward him. When I tried to pull away, he held on.

  “What were we arguing about? Well,” he said, “I said I had a lot of information he probably didn’t want widely known, but he didn’t exactly like being put in that position. And so he turned it around on me. He said, ‘If you fix things, then we’ll wipe the slate clean.’”

  “Let go,” I said.

  My wrist was throbbing. He was speaking in abstractions and clichés, and I didn’t know what he meant. Or maybe I did. If you fix things.

  “I wasn’t supposed to bring you that morning, but I did,” Carey said, “and Allagash, oh, he wasn’t too pleased about that.”

  “Let. Go.”

  “But I told him not to worry. I convinced him you wouldn’t be a problem.”

  The more I tried to wriggle free, the tighter Carey’s grip. It felt like he could snap my wrist.

  “But you had to go to him yesterday, didn’t you,” he said. “Now look where we are.”

  As I tried to pull away again, my feet were slipping on the dry, dirty slate—

  “Rebecca?”

  This call echoed from inside the empty house. Both Carey and I pivoted. Ezra emerged onto the terrace.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, approaching us fast. “Let go of her,” he said.

  Which Carey did, and he took a step away from me, reached around toward the small of his back, and pulled out a stubby black gun from his belt. It looked like a toy in his long fingers, like all he could do with it was start a race. Carey pointed the gun at Ezra, and Ezra stopped halfway across the terrace.

  I had left Carey’s note on my kitchen counter. Ezra must have let himself in and found it there—but he wouldn’t have let himself in unless he worried something was very wrong.

  “I told you to come alone,” Carey said.

  He let his arm fall briefly to his side, and Ezra stepped closer. Carey aimed the gun again. Ezra stood still.

  Now the sun was a heavy cloth dropping over all of us, pressing down against us. I knew then with certainty that Carey’s motives were malevolent and that I couldn’t believe anything he had told me, that he only wanted to seduce me into defenselessness—and then what, what had he planned to do?

  Ezra said, “Get away from her,” and he stepped forward again.

  Carey straightened his arm, his gun trained on Ezra’s chest.


  Ezra put his hands in the air—I surrender—but took another step closer.

  “Put the gun down,” I said, and Carey aimed the gun at me instead, at my face. I held my breath.

  I took one step back at the same time Ezra took one step forward, and Carey pointed the gun back at him.

  Ezra and I had a game we used to play when we were first together: How long could we conduct a conversation with improvised hand signals instead of speech? Would you like an apple? Yes, with some peanut butter, please. Maybe we should get another cat. I’m not ready for another cat. We should go to bed. I know, it’s late, but read me another chapter, pretty please.

  Ezra stepped forward, and I met his glance. The gun stayed on Ezra. Carey took a step back. The gun was on me. I stepped forward again. Ezra did, too. The gun was on him now, fixed on him. Ezra was looking at me, not Carey, blinking, one, two, three—

  And that was when I lunged forward and shoved my right hand flat against Carey’s sternum, once, hard, as hard as I could, up at an angle, my hand landing squarely over his heart. Carey stumbled back, his sneaker slipping on the slate, and he reached out to me, to grab hold of me, but he couldn’t and took a second step back, except this time his foot had nowhere to go.

  He made no sound when he fell, and there was no sound when he landed on the rocks, already a ghost, no sound at all.

  5

  EVEN NOW, ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY, I will occasionally follow a random stranger. Not long ago there was a young woman driving an old station wagon through a forest. It was very early, the fir line coming into view at dawn. I pulled into a rest stop when she did and only pretended to fill up my car with gas. I watched her unstrap a toddler from the back seat, lift him out, and set him on the ground. She knelt to wipe his nose and retie his sneakers. I could see the boy complain that now his sneakers were too tight, although it was possible he’d object to anything his mother did, like making him get out of the warm car in the first place, like driving all night. A little cloud of steam shot out from the child’s mouth in the cold dawn. I wanted to roll down my window and tell him to pretend his breath was dragon fire. Were they on the run? From what or from whom? Unpaid bills, someone abusive, some other misery—or maybe for good solid reasons, a reunion, a new chapter in a new place. The mother rebuckled her son into the car seat and pulled his scarf up over his nose. She removed the nozzle from her gas tank and slipped in behind the wheel. The station wagon pulled back out onto the highway. I let them go.